A major challenge facing educational programs in the 21st century is to promote learning aimed at the achievement of valued goals or standards. In an effort to assist educators to meet this challenge, an educational management system has been designed to assist programs to promote goal-directed standards-based learning for example as described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,322,366 and No. 6,468,085. The present patent application details additional innovations that enhance the usefulness of the system for learners involved in a variety of standards-based educational programs. A particularly important group of such learners is comprised of elementary and secondary school students receiving instruction aimed at the achievement of federal, state, and local standards.
In one educational management system, instruction to promote goal-directed learning is informed by assessment information indicating the capabilities that a learner has acquired and those that the learner will be ready to learn in the future. Item Response Theory (IRT) is used to estimate the probability that a learner will be ready to acquire capabilities reflecting goals that have not yet been mastered. There is room for innovations that enhance the construction of assessments and the use of assessment information to inform goal-directed standards-based learning.